According to Reuters, OpenAI is exploring making its own artificial intelligence chips, even looking into an acquisition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously blamed GPU shortages for users' concerns regarding the company API's speed and reliability, leading to these moves. OpenAI using its own chips could reduce its costs too. Based on analysis by Bernstein Research, each ChatGPT query costs the company around four cents. At the moment, NVIDIA controls the market for chips that power AI applications. The Microsoft supercomputer OpenAI used to develop its technology, for instance, uses 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring making its own artificial intelligence chips and has gone as far as evaluating a potential acquisition target, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The company has not yet decided to move ahead, according to recent internal discussions described to Reuters. However, since at least last year it discussed various options to solve the shortage of expensive AI chips that OpenAI relies on, according to people familiar with the matter. These options have included building its own AI chip, working more closely with other chipmakers including Nvidia and also diversifying its suppliers beyond Nvidia.

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Chinese internet giant Alibaba is doubling down on its chip manufacturing with a dedicated subsidiary, co-founder and chairman Jack Ma said at an event in Hangzhou this week. The company wants to launch its first self-developed AI inference chip in the second half of 2019, supporting its move into self-driving vehicles and smart products. The move follows the company's announcement back in April that it had begun testing its own autonomous vehicle technology. China's government has been pushing to raise the standard of its home-produced chips -- particularly for use within the transport and healthcare sector -- in a bid to raise its profile as a leading tech innovator, but also to avoid over-reliance on US imports, which are continually under jeopardy due to ongoing trade tensions. Back in June, for example, President Donald Trump levied a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods.

In a recent earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the automaker has been'stealth' developing a custom-built AI chip for at least two years. The self-driving technology is to be used in Tesla's Model 3, Model X and Model S Autopilot systems, and according to Musk, it will give its autonomous cars additional processing power. Tesla Director Pete Bannon explained the new chip -- which will be incorporated in a third update for Tesla's Autopilot hardware -- is currently undergoing road tests. Unlike previous Autopilot versions which relied on NVIDIA GPUs, the upgraded hardware will reportedly process a lofty 2,000 frames per second -- a significant rise from 200. Tesla has long entertained the possibility of manufacturing in-house AI chips for its autonomous EVs.

"We've been in semi-stealth mode on this basically for the last 2-3 years," said Elon Musk on an earnings call today. "I think it's probably time to let the cat out of the bag…" Otherwise known as "Hardware 3", it's a Tesla-built piece of hardware meant to be swapped into the Model S, X, and 3 to do all the number crunching required to advance those cars' self-driving capabilities. Tesla has thus far relied on Nvidia's Drive platform. By building things in-house, Tesla say it's able to focus on its own needs for the sake of efficiency. "We had the benefit […] of knowing what our neural networks look like, and what they'll look like in the future," said Pete Bannon, director of the Hardware 3 project.

The Chinese e-commerce giant will join a raft of other tech firms in designing its own processors tailored to in-house machine-learnings tasks. It's another sign of China's increasing desire to use its own chips. The news: Alibaba announced that it's building a chip called Ali-NPU--for "neural processing unit"--designed to handle AI tasks like image and video analysis. The firm says its performance will be 10 times that of a CPU or GPU performing the same task. The firm also announced that it has acquired a Hangzhou-based CPU designer called C-SKY.

Amazon has begun work on creating its own custom-made AI processors to power its Echo devices, reports have indicated, in order to decrease their reliance on the cloud. The addition of custom chips is intended to speed up the response times of Alexa, the company's AI assistant, a person familiar with the company's plans told The Information. At present, when users ask Alexa a question, the voice data is sent to Amazon's cloud to be analysed, interpreted and acted upon, whereas having dedicated silicon on the device allows much of that computation to be done locally. According to The Information, the e-tailer has nearly 450 employees with experience in the field of processor design, with many joining through a series of acquisitions including that of chip manufacturer Annapurna Labs for $350 million three years ago. The AI boom has sparked something of an arms race, with companies competing to develop specialised chips for performing the intensive workloads required for machine learning.

Right now, when you ask Alexa a question on a piece of Amazon-branded hardware like the Amazon Echo or Echo Show, your question is whisked off into the cloud for processing. The internal hardware in an Echo device is not fast or powerful enough to handle the question on its own, so there's a slight delay as your question is thrown to the cloud, answered, thrown back, and then finally made audible by Alexa. But that limitation is poised to change soon. According to The Information, Amazon is creating its own artificial intelligence chips for future Echo devices that will be powerful enough to handle simple questions "in-house," as it were. Questions like "What time is it?"

Amazon has begun designing its own AI chips, according to an exclusive report from The Information. The hardware is designed for anything powered by Alexa, including the Echo, and would allow the virtual assistant to respond more quickly by adding speech recognition directly to the device. Right now, whenever a user makes an inquiry on an Alexa-powered device, there is a delay while the virtual assistant contacts the cloud in order to interpret the request. While Echo devices would continue to rely on the cloud for complex inquiries, adding speech recognition directly would allow Alexa to perform simple tasks, such as checking the time, without that cloud delay. Amazon acquired chip designer Annapurna Labs back in 2015, and has slowly begun churning out its own processors.